Cuckoo Read online

  She placed the thermometer neatly on the bedside table, together with the chart and a blue biro. The dots were done in blue, the Cs in black, the dates in green, and red crosses for the five days of her period. (She’d learnt a lot from Charles.)

  She shut her eyes and returned to the Poly dance. Ned’s corduroy suit had been cleaned and valeted, his hair cut and styled at Michaeljohn. They were foxtrotting together in the ballroom of a stately country mansion. The sprawling plastic marigolds had rearranged themselves into formal phalanxes of expensive hot-house flowers. Dylan, Gareth, Les, were impeccable in cashmere dinner jackets and velvet cummerbunds. Ned’s dandelion had turned into an orchid.

  ‘I like you, Frances,’ he whispered, as he entwined it in her hair.

  The music had surged back, bludgeoning the silence of the bedroom, though she could still hear his voice throbbing and strumming above it.

  Strange how loud and clear the line was, now.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Charles, please.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Frances, I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t? You mean won’t.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m totally non-operational at the moment. I’ve got a hell of a problem on.’

  ‘You’ve always got problems. I’m getting sick of it. Your work comes between us like a great Berlin Wall. We can never relax because the bank rate’s up, or the exchange rate’s down, or the balance of payments is precarious.’

  ‘Well, this time, it’s nothing to do with work.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘In fact, I really ought to talk to you about it.’

  There, he’d got it out at last. He’d have to tell her sometime, so it might as well be now. Except he didn’t have the words. All his life he’d got to grips with things, papered over problems, talked his way through crises. But, now, he was dumb. He couldn’t even concentrate on the latest tax concessions from Zug. He was struggling through the German text, but all he could see were his wife’s accusing eyes tripping him up on every printed page. He had come home from the airport, laden with his Glenfiddich and her Chanel, flushed with achievement, happy to be back. Coq au vin for dinner, an Ashkenazy concert on the radio, and eight blessed hours’ sleep without a mosquito net, or prayer calls wailing through the dawn.

  The next morning, a phone call. One brief call and his world in smithereens. Frances’ world hadn’t even flickered. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know. And here she was, bleating on about a child, when the very word suddenly made him sick.

  If only it hadn’t been fucking day thirteen. Just his luck – her temperature had fallen on the morning he came home, that vital little dip she waited for so avidly each month. Day twelve, day thirteen, day fourteen – that’s all he ever heard. The whole universe was centred on his wife’s Fallopian tubes. She had her own private clock and calendar, set differently from everybody else’s. If they were toasting Christmas, she was weeping because her period had come. If Russia dropped an atom bomb on Richmond, she’d still be lying there, taking her temperature for a full three minutes by her watch. Christ, how tired he was of that passion-killing thermometer, the way it ruled their lives.

  He rubbed his eyes, tried to make sense of his economic forecasts. God Almighty! Frances’ little blue dots were straying even here. He couldn’t see his own charts, only the one-degree fall on hers. Frances had marked it with as much elation as if it were a dramatic fall in the minimum lending rate. The little blue dot swelled into an accusing finger. He was meant to chase it up, turn it from a paper cypher into something bigger and more permanent. He couldn’t. There was nothing there between his legs – only jet-lag.

  He put his work away. You couldn’t plot financial trends from the data of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Frances was sitting in the bedroom, trickling Chanel between her breasts. He watched her in the mirror, draped in her best satin nightie, and wearing anguish like a decoration. He had never liked the nightie and he couldn’t cope with anguish. He was damned if he’d allow her to lure him into bed, and then be forced to lie beside her like some limp laughing stock. And yet he cared for her – loved her even, if he dared use such a word. That’s what made the whole thing so disastrous. He walked across and kissed her on the throat.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ He’d apologized fifty times already, and each time diminished him. He wanted to overpower her with his strength, to shower on her anything she asked for. Yet, the only thing she did ask was a kid. And that he couldn’t give her. Not at the moment, not while …

  ‘You just don’t want a baby, do you, Charles?’ She was twisting her wedding ring round and round on her finger. ‘Why don’t you be honest? It’s so frustrating being messed about by gynaecologists and swallowing dangerous drugs, when you won’t even come near me.’

  ‘Look, Frances, I’ve had bad news. It’s nothing to do with you and your blasted babies. Don’t you understand?’ There he was, barking at her again, when he wanted to be rational. His head felt like a battleground, with Frances’ voice the endless whine of gun-fire in his ears.

  ‘How can I understand, when you keep the whole thing secret? I’d like to help, honestly I would. Couldn’t we just lie together? Just for comfort. We don’t have to do anything. It might even help you to relax.’

  ‘No.’

  She was scrubbing at her lips, almost rubbing off the skin. He longed to take her in his arms and kiss her better, confess the whole damned muddle and have her understand. But if he kissed her, she’d only ask for more. He hated having to produce it on demand. She was already nuzzling at his back. ‘Let’s just touch each other, Charles.’

  He moved away. Let’s just bloody fuck, that’s what she meant. The egg’s ready, I’m ready, and there’s nothing else that matters in the world. He could almost see her cosseting that egg, wrapping it in tissue like the emeralds he brought her back from Bogota. More infinitesimal than a pin-prick, one hundred times smaller than a frog’s egg. That’s what she had told him – Frances always had her facts. And yet the tiny egg had grown into a carbuncle, filling the room, blotting out everything else in her life.

  Two days later, it was dead. It lived only a day like a mayfly, and it had died unfertilized. Frances mourned it as if it were a child already. He could hear her tears sniping through the bedroom. He hated tears. They made him feel guilty and angry and helpless, all at once. If only she realized what a mess he was in himself. There were worse things in the world than not conceiving. He wanted to shake his fist at the whole cock-up of a universe and shout at it, for making everything so difficult for both of them. Instead, he calmed his voice, took a step or two towards her.

  ‘Look, just relax, darling, give it time.’

  ‘But I haven’t got that much time, Charles. I’m already old to be a mother, and I’ve only got two more months of Clomid left. Rathbone won’t let me take it any longer, in case of side effects. We’ve wasted this first month completely. I might as well have chucked the tablets down the drain.’

  ‘Well, let’s concentrate on next month. Things will be different then. I’ll have sorted out my problems and …’

  Charles had still said nothing. He and Frances sat like stiff cardboard cut-outs on each side of the dead marble fireplace, dinner uneaten in the dining-room, coffee cold on the table. Only the clocks made conversation. Charles had the usual papers on his knee, but his eyes were closed. He never sat in silence, wasting time. Frances felt marooned, shut out behind the barrier of his eyelids. She leant across and took his hand.

  ‘Shall I put the concert on?’ Boulez was conducting Boulez.

  ‘No thanks.’

  Charles never missed a Boulez concert. He set his life to music, more or less. She was so used to his evenings of quadraphonic Karajan or veteran Toscanini, she felt almost threatened by the hush. He preferred pre-Romantic, or post-Mahler composers, the stern ordered cadences of Buxtehude, Rameau, and the Bachs, the lucid intellectuality of Schoenberg and Webern. The nineteenth century le
ft him wary. He hated raw emotion running riot in his music; insisted on structure and control. Their whole married life had been wreathed in Telemann and Pergolesi, Berg and Hindemith. Sometimes she’d resented it. How could you switch on Armchair Thriller, with Monteverdi’s Vespers praying through the house, or get a word in edgeways when Stockhausen’s querulous ring-modulators were monopolizing the conversation?

  She suspected Charles used music like his work, as a barrier between them, protecting him against too much conversation or the danger of deep communication. Music filled all the cracks and spaces in their life, like cultural polyfilla – blocking precious crevices which might have been used for something spontaneous and intimate.

  But now that Charles had switched to silence, it was worse. The whole house seemed to hold its breath, as he sat dumb and inaccessible behind the drawbridge of his face. Menace oozed out of the heavy mahogany furniture and hung like a cloud in the air. It was only a few days since he’d returned from Bahrain, but it felt like a whole lumbering century, crawling at snail’s pace through her mind and turning her and the house grey before its time.

  Wednesday dinner, they ploughed through grilled haddock. His face was still shuttered, all the blinds down. But at least he was eating.

  ‘Nice?’ she asked. He needed encouragement.

  ‘Mmm.’ He didn’t even look up.

  ‘Not too salty?’

  ‘No, fine.’

  They were back to monosyllables, almost like Medfield. She was sorry now she’d given up the driving job. It would have provided a distraction from Charles’ misery, and in his present condition he wouldn’t have even noticed she was working. She longed to help him, comfort him, but Charles’ pride dictated that he should never need help. She had learnt not to fuss, not to ask questions, though this time she was worried, since the whole Parry Jones efficiency machine was clearly shambling to a halt. It was only tiny things, insignificant to other people, but for her they were warning signs. He’d started ripping open his mail in the mornings, instead of slitting it neatly with his silver paper-knife. He scribbled notes on scrappy bits of paper, rather than in the correct colour-coded notebook. Some plants arrived from Fernstream Nurseries, and he left them dying and unopened in the hall.

  She wished to God he’d switch to a different profession – anything, so long as it was less high-powered and stressful. A teacher, for example, with shorter hours and longer holidays. They hardly knew any teachers – Charles regarded them as non-productive leftists. She stabbed a potato and suddenly saw Ned’s grin skulking at the bottom of her plate. Ned was a teacher. Or at least he was when he wasn’t a shepherd or a fisherman. She grinned back.

  Charles pushed away his haddock. ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Funny how you could meet a hundred people and forget them instantly; then a special one popped up and imprinted himself indelibly, for no real reason. Well, no more reason than purple vests and lugworm. She prodded her courgettes. ‘Oh, Charles …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s hell here, at the moment. If work’s such a strain, you ought to take a rest. It’s bad for both of us.’

  ‘We’re going out on Tuesday.’

  ‘That’s only dinner. You need more than Amanda Crawford’s fricassee of veal to buck you up. You’re in quite a state, you realize.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  She was amazed that he admitted it. ‘Why don’t we go away then, just for a day or two? You need a break from the office.’

  ‘It’s not the office, Frances, not this time. Look, I think I’d better talk to you about it …’

  She suddenly felt frightened, stared down at her plate. Ned’s grin had disappeared into the gravy. There were only Charles’ pale full lips facing her across the table. He leant across and kissed her. The kiss continued, though she tried to pull away. Charles never mixed up sex with mealtimes. Another sign of strain.

  ‘Let’s make love,’ he urged.

  ‘But we haven’t had our pudding.’

  ‘Bugger the pudding!’

  ‘Charles!’

  ‘I want you, Frances.’

  But I don’t want you, she almost said. She somehow lost all interest once she’d passed day sixteen and there was no hope of a baby. The whole act seemed meaningless. But Charles was now unbuttoning her blouse. She’d never known him like this, spontaneous, on heat. Normally, he waited till after the late night news; did things at the proper time, prepared the room and atmosphere – dimmers on the bedside lights, the curtains drawn, a record on the stereo. They didn’t actually make love in their own bedroom, but in a spare room with a double bed. It was beautifully furnished, but used only for sex, as if they might contaminate themselves if they did anything else in it. Their own bedroom had single beds. Charles claimed he got too hot if he slept with her beside him, and he didn’t like the covers rumpled up.

  She had no reason to complain. It was always a superb performance in the spare room, though she sometimes wished it wasn’t quite so formal. It reminded her of church, the way Charles went on – his hushed voice throbbing through the sacred gloom. She felt she ought to burn incense, or wear a cassock. It would be fun to giggle with him sometimes, or munch Mars bars under the blankets.

  Even now, he didn’t skip the preparations. She could hear him running his pre-intercourse bath. She went into her own, smaller bathroom and took a shower. It was part of the schedule. Showers, deodorant, aftershave, foreplay. She unscrewed the scent he’d brought her from the airport, watched a drop dribble down between her breasts, breasts still small and firm. She wondered what would happen if she ever had a baby. Would they sag and droop like Viv’s? She’d seen Viv naked once and it had shocked her – the earth mother parcelled in her own flesh. She was glad she had a waist, and a small neat bottom which didn’t ooze all over the chairs. Even five children and all that teeming fecundity couldn’t make up for looking like Viv. Was that why Charles didn’t want a baby, because he didn’t fancy her fat and slack and marked? But why couldn’t they talk about it, as other people did? Charles was like an iceberg – she knew only the tip which showed above the surface, not the depths submerged beneath. He was acting strangely even at the moment, demanding sex in the middle of a meal, when he’d refused it on those vital fertile days. It wasn’t even lust – he was too miserable for that – more like desperation. There was an iron coating even on the kiss.

  She arranged her body neatly on the bed. Rathbone had advised her never to refuse him. If she cold-shouldered him at any time, he might be less eager in that all-important middle of the month. Charles walked in, naked except for his underpants. It was one of his quirks, always to leave his pants on till the very last moment, as if he were ashamed of what they hid. He had a tall, slim body, muscular and well-made. Not that she ever saw much of it. As soon as they were undressed, it was under the covers for both of them. She sometimes felt he’d have preferred to do it in his pinstripes.

  She slipped off the bed to find a suitable cassette. Charles kept his cassette deck in the spare room, so that even their love-making was duly harmonized.

  ‘No, don’t bother with the music, darling. I’ve got to talk to you.’

  Frances clutched the Brandenburg Concertos like a shield in front of her. Charles never talked when he made love, always claimed it spoilt his concentration. It seemed strange to talk stark naked, anyway, ranged on opposite sides of the room as if they were about to fight a duel, the silence between them solid, like a piece of furniture.

  ‘Well?’ she said, defensively.

  Suddenly, he switched on the radio and Bartok roared into the room. He hated Bartok – all that bilge about the brotherhood of nations and the treasurehouse of peasant warblings. Even now, she could hear the gutsy folk rhythms bringing Hungary to Richmond; wild sweeps from gypsy violins stampeding through suburbia.

  ‘It’s too loud, Charles, turn it down.’

  He took hold of her instead and pulled her to the floor. He was breaking all hi
s own rules – no Sleepeezee mattress or elaborate coaxing foreplay. Just the rough scratch of the carpet underneath her bare buttocks and his angry thing tearing in and out of her, and Bartok bawling on the dressing-table.

  ‘Frances, you’ve got to listen to me …’

  ‘How can I listen with this noise?’

  He was thrusting harder, out of time with the music, wrenching her body into a discordant key.

  ‘I can’t hear, Charles. And you’re hurting.’

  It was impossible to talk. His mouth was crushing hers. Behind her head, she could hear another voice, the suave bellow of the Radio 3 announcer, turned up to a hundred decibels. Bartok was over, and the roaring, booming Eton-and-Oxford larynx introducing a talk on modern physics.

  ‘Heisenberg declared that in their new designations as conjugate observables …’

  ‘Look, Frances, I didn’t tell you before, but …’ He was hammering into her, as if all the pent-up misery of the last few days had broken through a dam and come pouring out. This wasn’t making love; it wasn’t even sex, but some strange pagan rite, some terrible release. Fifteen years of bedroom courtesy and drawing-room control had snapped. He was rutting like an animal.

  ‘I didn’t want to deceive you. I agonized for years …’

  How could he talk and do it at the same time? She tried to exchange his voice for Heisenberg’s.

  ‘Indeterminacy ruled that no quantum mechanical system could simultaneously possess …’

  The whole of Surrey could hear this physics lesson. It was so loud, the room resounded with it, Heisenberg battering into her, along with Charles.